2026: again, another year of blog on the desktop, again, another time
it is new years eve as i start this, around 9:30pm. i'm sitting on the couch alone in quasi-silence - my upstairs neighbors are blasting music and there's the typical commotion outside during holidays. one of us in this apartment is getting over covid and it's not me. we'd like to keep it that way, hence me being alone on a couch. pumagreg is making his rounds of crawling all around me to see which part of my body is moving the least as i type so he can take his 17th nap of the day. a couple of days ago was the 11 year anniversary of me adopting him and he's still just a little guy. i just finished reading the first fifth of james baldwin's "another country" and before that i made a clay version of a lemon pig because i have no whole lemons and despite testing negative i still think it's best for everyone if i stay indoors. i have a roof over my head, a loving partner and cat, a clay lemon pig to paint in the morning...i am alive and my edible is going to hit any minute now. this blog post is more for me than anyone else, but i'm glad you're here.
it's a blessing in viral disguise, i guess and will take whether i like it or not, to have to sit in solitude the day before a new year. it sets a nice, very low bar for 2026 and forces me to become just the right amount of bored to dive into live laugh blog archive and reflect my 2025 goals, wins and flops. in 2025, i wrote:
"i'm going to be very pleased with myself in january 2026 to be able to come back to this list and give myself the deserved time to celebrate my wins"
spoiler alert: i was right. anyway, let's walk through my goals and highlights from my progress.
✅ "post more often on the blog"
while in 2025 i wrote 26 posts on here, in 2026 i wrote 60! i accomplished this by starting a weekly retro series when i turned 40 in february. i've not missed a single week yet and the habit of reflecting on the week every sunday has done wonders for my brain fog and my writing. also this spring, live laugh blog turned 5. 23 of you subscribe to my rss->email list and i love you all like my half-brother's cousins - who are all lovely by the way. if you want to keep up with retros and all my other blog posts, you can subscribe for free. it's not substack!
✅ "start selling my weird candle sculptures"
blah blah blah we all know i quit my corporate job in fall of 2024 in order to make it to age 40 with at least some of my mind, body and spirit intact. let my haters know they have nothing to cheer about because i lived, bitch. and i made a whole ass company - bugs rock llc - and actually started selling my weird candle sculptures on the whole ass internet. in its first two quarters i have sold 100 candles, which is 100 more than i've ever sold before! i'm excited to take the shop and my candle practice to the next level in the new year, and i appreciate all of you who have bought my work.
prototypes of egg candles i made in january, a couple of the designs made the cut in bugs rock collections!
✅ "make a collection of paintings showing off my figure and airbrushing practice"
i also sold 7 paintings, which i included airbrush sketches with. i found that a local printroom did weekly figure drawing so i went back for that in the spring. i just started a pixel art painting series that are figures from some of those sketching sessions, and i've been recording the process. i definitely did not get as far with this goal as i'd have liked to, but, well, i was busy starting and running a business lol.
😅 "stream weekly as a vehicle for keeping my sites and art fresh"
while i did not accomplish this, i did stream a huge 26 times, so i didn't do bad. the majority of them were about migrating off of glitch - oh, yeah, several months after i quit fastly they announced they were shutting down glitch. this was the major flop of the year, but it wasn't mine. i was sure happy to not have to be there to bury it, but i spent many hours streaming and finding alternatives which was a learning experience in streaming and the current web deployment ecosystem. we've lost a lot of really good things and glitch was one of them. i guess that's showbiz, baby.
please like and subscribe lol
✅ "read more than 12 books"
i read 14 books, and i started listing them here because i don't use goodreads because amazon owns them, but i wanted to have a link to share if anyone asked. this goal was only met because i found my very old kobo ebook reader and have since been borrowing ebooks from the library, probably my most useful screen next to my actual computer.
✅ "get more involved in more in-person communities"
if you want to find your people, you got go out and be among the people. i practiced this by setting the intention that if i found anything interesting stapled to a telephone pole, or an opportunity was offered that involved being among people, i needed to say yes. because of telephone pole flyers, i've gotten back into figure drawing and i started learning ceramics. the ceramics studio has especially become a beloved third place for me. i was offered the opportunity to do a very short-term consulting gig, which i said yes to even though i didn't need to - but it was a great experience where i learned a lot, met a lot of people, and got some extra money so i can buy a new laptop. yesterday i responded to a call for resumes from our soon-to-be new mayor and i have no idea if i would be useful but i'll never know if i don't say yes to trying.
this is me in the ceramic studio. my first wheel throwing class starts next week!
😅 "run a virtual event, like livelaughconf 2.0 for its 5th (!) birthday"
there are two reasons why i couldn't get around to this, the first one being the glitch shutdown. there were several stressful weeks of hearing gossip and different sides of what was actually happening to glitch before fastly went public. it wasn't my place to speak publicly, but you can trust i made my voice heard as much as possible (and respectfully) to the powers that had been. anyway, then we all had 6 weeks to find new homes for our apps, blah blah blah, see above about my streaming from the year. i could have punted plans to the fall, but then my father who i had hardly spoken with for well over a decade had a heart attack and two strokes and i reconnected so i can help my half-brother take care of him. you know, just life being a highway and every day being a winding road or whatever.
✅ "truly, deeply enjoy turning 40"
i am going to give myself this one because i'm still alive. it's tough having a february birthday especially when our authoritarian administration started - predictably imho - destroying everything that is good and civil in our society immediately after the inauguration. it was hard to find any motivation to celebrate or try to get my friends to celebrate. i had always imagined having a huge 40th birthday bash, but that just wasn't in the cards for me to put together. last minute, i did pull together a very small, intimate gathering at my home because if i had done nothing that would just be me punishing myself for something i didn't do. but i had no regrets in february after leaving my job and i've only gotten stronger in muscles and talent since then, so i'm giving this goal a check.
✅ "don't chop my hair off"
my amazing hair stylist and her partner, upon the election results, understandably decided it was time to move abroad. fortunately, i found a new stylist who is amazing, shouts out to elena at paloma salon. i very well could have found the wrong person who would have messed my shag up or tell me to go short again. my alopecia cropped up again a few weeks ago, but it appears to be regrowing in that spot. i tell you this because it could absolute impact 2026's chances of me going overboard like i had done several years ago when my alopecia first came out.
🤣 "do 5 solid pushups"
me when i got to this one and saw it was the last: "lol go fuck yourself, jennifer." i don't even think i've tried a pushup in like 10 months, it just doesn't come up in my aerial yoga practice. planking does, so maybe i could do one pushup if i tried, but i won't. speaking of aerial yoga, i reached 150 classes in october, and right now i'm at 163 i think. before my dad got sick i was going 3x a week, but since then i have been going 2x. i definitely leveled up in that practice especially when it comes to doing flips and more circusy stunts. i definitely decreased how much weights i'd been lifting and treadmill walks i'd been doing, but overall i'm still very active.
here are my goals for 2026
- blog more again, but essays this time
- get better at video-editing (ie. stream and post more videos)
- level up in python (especially for hardware and atproto)
- get my art portfolio up to date and cool looking
- paint every week
- read at least 18 books
- make bugs rock profitable
- continue improving in my current practices (ceramics and aerial yoga)
- get into sewing
- do 5 solid pushups (or just lift more weights dingus lol)
bonus: what's in and what's out for 2026
in:
- making videos *alongside, not instead of, written word
- tinned fish but in a normal way
- stretching
- blocking and muting, fast and often
- expanding media consumption into different genres than you're used to
- buying used or handmade
- vintage cameras
- saying yes, but conditionally and intentionally of course
out:
- allergic reactions avoidable by paying more attention to labels
- being expected to have an opinion about everything
- qualifying obvious opinions by saying they are opinions
- hating the internet instead of making the internet
- establishments with no mocktail menu
- paying for (or attention to) generative ai
- caffeination as a lifestyle/personality
- not challenging authority or bad drivers
it's 11:47pm now so i'm going to close this and publish it tomorrow when it is actually 2026. thank you for reading my blog, enjoying my art, and just being here. i wish you a happy new year, one with a little bit more peace and justice (perhaps revenge?) for the planet and all of its creatures - including you and i. if all goes according to plan, i'll be ending this blog post with a finished, lucky, painted lemon pig.
xoxo jenn
